Apocalyptic Horrors

Apocalyptic Horrors

Samuel Bird

“1854 calories,” I read. “30 servings,” I read just above the first line. I grabbed my notebook that was to my left before scribbling the total 55,520 calories down on a list of other amounts that would be tallied later. I then grabbed the pail of food and moved it from an uncounted pile to my right to a counted pile on my left. Up next, a flat of canned green beans I bought nine years prior during the depths of my poverty. I forewent a meal then, to save up this stash for now. Another count, a tally, and an amount to be summed later. I knew the way that I was counting calories was a cheap and lazy way to do the math, but it was better than no counting. Perhaps next time I would look at vitamin offerings as a percentage of the recommended need, food category, or protein contents. Why was I doing this? On one hand, I did not trust the nutrient recommendations labeled to these cheap foodstuffs. However, I needed to know. How long could I make it for when it happened. When the entire world went back to that way I knew it was. That way that hid itself from all the unassuming and naive. I totaled the calories, divided them by what I understand to be the needed amount per day and found I had 1.18 years supply of food, not including what my new chickens could produce. I stood up to find my obsessive mind had forced me to go at this until my joints were bruised against my cold cabin floor. There was still more to be done. I pulled out my old military rucksacks filled with shorter term foodstuffs, tools, ropes, knives, clothes, and thick wool blankets. Before me, a pile of military suprlus gear I prayed would afford me one more use when needed. I had the rest of the numbers, now it was time for the finale. I pulled out a large missile cannister and pulled out smaller ammo cans which I had refilled with the miscellaneous calibers that corresponded to the firearms I had amassed. I counted each box with its associated contents, and compared it to what seemed reasonable. What was reasonable about what I was doing or war for that matter? What of the stealing away of one’s soul was enlightened? With this grimness, I walked to the safe, typed in the code, and ran my hands across them. Each, a promise in steel that I would be secure. That was why I did this. I would never be that unsafe again. Famine, pestilence, and violence could wage and wane all they wished. They were accorded in my plan. This concerning pattern of thought had served me well. These strangely hordish behaviors kept me alive as a child who didn’t know when food would come, and when it would be taken away in punishment. In the middle of the Covid lockdowns, the cardboard boxes of extra food and toiletries my roommates teased me for collecting, lived out their telos. I was doing this to feel that feeling that is worth temporary insanity; security. My being was not going to be stolen from me by the unfortunate happenstance around me. My stoicism could extend to the rest of my being as my flesh could also be unaffected. While it was security I was after, was it because I was fearful?

Calls to make, notes to take, and I could not look away from the headlines. The next world war was purported here and nuclear holocaust alleged there. My desk was littered with notes and letters, but my mind wasn’t available for their viewing. This was it. They were all about to see. The world was about to see the truth, and yet I couldn’t revel in it. Security could be stolen away in an instant. No armor, house wall, or medicine could save someone from a nuclear blast. There are many people who prepare for the worst and there are many people who refer to nay saying in the street, but this was not something I wished for. I had to keep a somberness in my preparations as this was not something I wished for. In a moment before the processing mind could understand, a beam of sheer light and propelled matter would steal away some poor soul from its body. For another, the contaminates would slowly destroy its subatomic structure as they were painfully aware of so. Nothing about this could be something I wished for or made light of. However, in my expectation for it, their was some resolve or reprieve. Now, they would see. They would see the truth, and it would be known. I would no longer be an outsider, divorced from all souls, but one of them and commiserately so. I would let their legacy live on in that part of myself that died with them. For those that lived, however, they would know the truth. Or at least, I thought. As the creator of Esse Maxim, I get to carefully conscious of my assertions of truth. How was I so sure that I knew something and they did not? Out of all the phenenenom that perception pulls into mind, there is one that stands unique and non-arbitrarily distinct from the rest. I call these the horrors. The gentle narrative of life being sequenced by facts we plan for is ripped apart by the hands of a natural disaster that in one moment causes a barrage of matter more than ourselves to destroy everything around us. Missiles crash to our side and remind us that a few feet to the right and we would have not had another day to awake from. Finally, I think of that look. If you have ever seen it, you will never forget it until you can’t remember anything else. It’s past rage and hate into something more extreme. Seeing murder in someone’s eye, and you will look for it in every eye you see again. Perhaps the gentle crease of the eyelid from the smile is a lie, and it is a facade hiding that one thing, the truth, the murder in the gaze. It is not that you are, or I am in this story, scared of it. What you see in the horror is a realness surpassing all other moments in the exactness you experience it, or in terms of how closely it grasps the facts of the world. Life was only warranted being, when it was contracted to die. There is every bit is as much death as there are births, minus those that will die soon. The horror shakes us from our social pretenses and points us with quivering finger toward reality having no mind for our values. I stand on cliff’s edge and the wind gently reminds me it neither cares, nor would stop if I were to be moved one foot forward. This is what the mindscar understands so deeply. From impressions of the horrors, it knows the facts of the world and waits patiently for them to come and burns up the body and brain in anticipation. That is why I prepare and why something in my disturbingly yearns for chataclysm. As the nation around me is pushed into financial woes and I do well, we meet in the same standard of living. It is no longer that I am impoverished and all others are wealthy. Perhaps then in that war-torn world, I would belong. They would know those same horrors. We could then do the most bonding of communicative experiences, and gesture to the world and both find it so. Kind lies torn away for the truth. But then again, do I err in saying the truth?

If I call insanity the variance between one’s perception and consequence handling of the world, then we are all insane. This is because of the chasmic discrepancy between any way the world may be, and the weak way we can justify our belief of it. Of course, there is a further category of insanity that struggles to sufficiently grasp reality to survive in it, and that is a seperate question. However, I seek to remind you that the primary difference between you and a schizophrenic, is that people don’t constantly discredit your perception of the world. The schizophrenic finds a similar degree of realness in their perception. Esse Maxim comes from an awareness of my insanity and desire to make my delusions consistent and grounded. This is where I can hold up my plea of insanity to my perception of the horrors. Maybe, I have no idea what I am talking about. Perhaps it is not that I have seen the true reality and everyone else would be so lucky as to know the enlightened truth I possess, as much as it is that the place in the world I have occupied has led me to find it so. For this reason I am far from pathological as it contingently follows what I think from what I have perceived. However, this is far from certifying the universal rightness in these thoughts. Have I been able to see facts that don’t come down to the horrors being the base of reality? I have a few. Can I see people who’s net response to the world has little input from the horrors? I do. This is not to lightly discredit myself. It would be hard to convince me everyone else is less mad and there is great wisdom in my insanity. It has kept me safe while still having concern for those around me. However, what I have done is removed the burden of rightness for myself. I think that the natural horrors are more consistent and real than the hedonic society that has been built. Of course I think this, that is why I believe it. However, in great younger wisdom I found skepticism is a double-edged blade. While I have reason for believing what I do, I am able to step outside of myself and find the contingent nature of those facts. I do not plan to get rid of my stockpiled canned goods or wool blankets, but perhaps I can also allow a thin ray of hope for the world going another direction. I will ever be cautious about a world that lets the underbrush grow as it builds a massive global system un-derived from biological facts that builds until proverbial super-wildfires desimate. However, I might also be an idiot and have no idea what I am talking about. I take honor in how much I care about what I believe and how much I do in it’s calling. However, I am sure grateful I don’t have to believe everything I think. If you read my work because you think I possess that secret truth you are sure is out there, please accept my apologies in wasting your time and put the book down. While I may describe a uniquely unspoken part of the human experience, I’ve only been able to exist from one point of perception at a time and for only twenty six years. Rather, what I do is suppose this and hypothesize that. However, it is not the concepts that possess the quality we search after, but our working with them. I have been wrong countless times over. Right now I am pretty sure we are on the brink of world war, and won’t be surprised that I am wrong. It is not the ideas I am working with, but that I am working with them. I am showing you the loving way I participate in this reality that possesses all adjectives. So what did we learn today? Aside from my regular insights on engaging with existence, nothing. I am just very honored that you would spend a few minutes listen to the rantings of a caring crazy guy who stockpiles for armegeddon. Although, if the apocalypse does happen, I do reserve the right to say ad hoc, “I knew it all along!”